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Friday, October 28, 2011

中华中学的运动会！ Zhong Hua Zhong Xue's Sports Meeting!

Duration: 1.5 days

Location: New School

Grades: Middle School-High School

Just a heads up...when I say 1.5 days I don't mean 36-48 continuous hours! The Sports meeting was held on Friday and Saturday, on Friday is was from 7AM-5PM and on Saturday it was from 7AM-12PM. I was surprised that the sports meeting would actually take this long but with the amount of people in the school, I guess it was quite reasonable..afterall there were probably more than 1,000 students and a bunch of teachers (like I mentioned before, each grade has around 12-15 main classrooms/homerooms and each class has about 50 students, so that is a lot of students!). When my host sister and I arrived everyone was getting ready outside. My first thought was "Wow, this is so much different than any event in America!" Outside there were a bunch of little seats lined up in rows and each row had been labelled according to the homeroom, mine was 高二(八) (Gao Er, (Ba)).

All of the seats lined up! You can see the label!

I was quite bewildered when the sports event started. It wasn't a typical "Welcome everybody to the 2011 Sports meet! *Woohooo!!*" It was more like: Marching in an orderly fashion and raising the chinese flag. It was different than what I was expecting but It wasn't bad...it was fascinating because it was something I never saw and something I have never experienced before. There were around 30 or so people who represented each grade level and marched around the track. No one really explained the real meaning behind the marching and flag raising but I guess it was self-explanitory.

After the beginning ceremony, all of the students busted out their snacks and started talking to their friends. Not many of them paid much attention to what was going on in the field, which took me by surprise since I imagined all of them to be watching attentively. I expected everyone to be involved and cheering each other on with school spirit but this was America that I was idealising. Most of the students just walked around, ate or chatted with their friends...some were cheering kids on but I did not see much of this. There were many different activities happening at the same time. One group would be running the 800m while other people would be doing the long-jump, shot-put and things like that.

I wasn't going to take part in the sports meet mainly because I didn't have the type of clothes to run in other than the long sweats and jacket that the school provided for me (which was the uniform). At around 12, it was lunch time and the cafeteria was so packed! My friends and I decided to skip and come back later. When most people were finished eating we headed to the supermarket in the school and just sat at the benches outside. We sat there for a couple of hours and killed time by talking, playing games and listening to music. I communicated with them through Chinese which felt good because I feel like I'm making a lot of progress!

1 comment:

AHH this is so cool. its so different how they are very serious then it like a whatever thing. here in hawaii it would b like "ALOOOOHA" "alooha" "howzit everybody thanks for commin!! wwere gona have alot of fun today!!.........." bla bla bla :p and then it would b competitive, like all sku picnic!!! tugga-a-war (ik thats now how its correctly spelt, but thats how i say it :p )